[pdonis]

> general principles of accounting.

I'm not sure what those have to do with this question, since it's a legal question, not an accounting question.

> I feel pretty confident that if a state tax authority agrees with the deed date being the transfer date, then the IRS would as well.

In many cases a state tax authority wouldn't even be involved, since many states don't tax capital gains (which is what would be involved with a home sale) while the US Federal government does.

> negative sentiment about government bureaucracy

Evidently your experiences with government bureaucracies have been very, very different from mine.

[mindslight]

This turned very argumentative very fast. I had thought we were having an amicable discussion about the semantics of real estate titles.

I mentioned my experience with a state tax authority because it is direct personal experience about this very topic. I don't know why you turned that into being about the IRS, and are now even seemingly rejecting the state tax authority "being involved". The date of the transfer was directly relevant to my disagreement with the state tax authority, and they didn't question that date being the deed date even though the recording happened some time later. Either believe me or not, I don't care.

> Evidently your experiences with government bureaucracies have been very, very different from mine.

Sure? I'm not saying they were a some pleasant, responsive, quick, and casual experience - rather much less bad than I was expecting. And dealing with some corporate bureaucracies has been much worse, with constant transferring and calling back every week to check on status and make sure a ticket didn't get stuck and timeout, etc.

[pdonis]

> I don't know why you turned that into being about the IRS

Um, because that's what I orginally began talking about when the topic of taxes came up? Go back and look at the first post of mine in this subthread where I explicitly mentioned the IRS. You brought up state tax authorities after that, not before.

> and are now even seemingly rejecting the state tax authority "being involved".

If you sell a home in a state that doesn't tax capital gains--such as the state I live in, and indeed every state in which i have sold a home--then the state tax authority is not involved. Which is what I already explicitly said.

> Sure?

Quite sure. I never assumed your experience was "pleasant, responsive, quick and casual"--indeed, your "much less bad than I was expecting" was how I already had read your previous post. And that experience is, as I said, very, very different from experiences I have had with government bureaucracies (not all such experiences, but enough of them that they are not outliers), for which the most charitable description I could give would be "much, much worse than I was expecting".

> dealing with some corporate bureaucracies has been much worse

I certainly have had bad experiences with corporate bureaucracies as well, and I was in no way implying that they are any better than government bureaucracies. My average experience with both is probably about the same.